Local first applications are a paradigm of data governance and where data is stored. In a local first application the data is stored locally or ‘on the device’ itself. This is often paired with ‘owning your data’, but not necessarily.
Note taking
Obsidian and NVIM are local first. They save data locally on your machine, unencrypted, making you the owner of the data. Notion on the contrary saves it in the cloud and makes it more difficult to export it.
Laws like GDPR gives you the right to request your data, but that doesn’t mean it’s local first.
This ties well when you think that users should have easy access to their own data.